Manga piracy is a major issue. For instance, between January-October 2021, piracy in Japan caused manga creators and publishers to lose 800 billion yen (about $6.92 billion), which is more than the creators and publishers legally made during that time. Manga publishers are responding in …Read more »
Now that it’s 2022, numbers are being crunched to see how many manga sold last year . . . and how many were illegally read through piracy sites. The results are pretty sobering. All that piracy in 2021 bilked manga creators and publishers out of …Read more »
The administrator of the manga piracy website Manga-Mura was recently sentenced to three years plus major fines after costing the manga industry $2.93 billion in damages. However, since his arrest other manga piracy sites have popped up and exploded during COVID-19. The Japanese news outlet …Read more »
The trial is now over for 29-year-old Romi Hoshino, the alleged administrator of notorious manga piracy site Manga-Mura. Hoshino was arrested in 2019 on a slew of copyright violations, and the Fukuoka District Court found him guilty today in Japan. The sentence comes down to …Read more »
Ukyou Kodachi formerly wrote for the Boruto manga, and he’s also written scripts for Fate/Grand Order and is behind the series composition for SEVEN KNIGHTS REVOLUTION: Hero Successor. He regularly tweets to his 22,000 followers, but while most of his tweets are in Japanese, he …Read more »
Publisher Shogakukan became aware of someone posting dialogue from their manga on a “spoiler website.” Allegedly this person posted almost all the text from sixty-three manga chapters of Kengan Omega by Yabako Sandrovich without permission. Shogakukan took this to court, wanting to figure out who …Read more »
Japan’s Shuppan Kagaku Kenkyujo (a.k.a. Research institute of publication science) has crunched the numbers and says that print and digital sales of manga in 2020 were phenomenal. Manga brought in more than 600 billion yen (a little under 5.5 billion dollars) during the year, breaking …Read more »
What do you do when you’re stuck at home because of COVID? Many otaku are increasing their manga reading, but unfortunately, that includes pirated manga. The Authorized Books of Japan publishing industry group (a.k.a ABJ) have crunched numbers, and they don’t like what they see. …Read more »
Mangaka Gino0808 has published Yukionna to Kani wo Kurau (translated as “Devouring a Snow Woman and Crab”) and Doteibanashi (translated as “Virgin Story”), neither of which has been licensed in America. But if readers have been checking out illegal scanlations or other forms of pirating, …Read more »
Manga piracy—in other words, the illegal downloading without any connection to creators or publishers—has hurt manga companies and makers in both Japan and America. How to fix this has been a matter of debate over the years, and the Japanese Diet has come up with …Read more »
Danica Davidson
Joseph Luster
